The walls approach Linda (Rose Byrne), a therapist having the worst week of his life, in Mary Bronstein’s exhilarating anxiety attack of a feature, “If I had legs I’d kick you.” And the roof drops too.
In writer/director Bronstein’s second film (2008’s “Yeast”), Byrne gives what will be one of the year’s great screen performances, channeling Genea Rowlands in anguished close-up as a therapist whose sick daughter needs round-the-clock care, whose apartment is flooded to the point of devastation and whose husband (Christian Slater) is nowhere to be found. This horror film about motherhood, which premiered at Sundance on Friday afternoon to a packed library audience, comes to the festival with A24 already in place as a distributor for later this year.
If not, the buyers would scramble. Audiences were astounded and struck in equal measure by a film that has drawn comparisons to “Uncut Gems” (another A24 title, and with overlap thanks to Josh Safdie as producer) as Byrne has a wine-and-weed-fueled nervous breakdown for two hours. Today’s most mundane frustrations, from haranguing parking attendants to her hapless patients, become operatic problems as Australian “Damages” and “Bridesmaids” breakout Byrne delivers a career crown.
Before the lively, standing-room-only screening, Sundance programming director Kim Yutani nearly threw her opening remarks from the stands, while Bronstein urged the audience to forget whatever they were going through today (and everything the world is going through) to submit to her crazy vision. The applause was enthusiastic afterwards, but I heard a festival-goer behind me whisper “dark … disturbing” after the closing credits before leaving the theater.
Joining Bronstein after the screening for a Q&A were Byrne and her co-star Conan O’Brien, who A24 personally invited to read the script. He plays Linda’s miserable therapist and said he was surprised Byrne didn’t check himself into a hospital after production. (They had four weeks of intensive rehearsals before filming took place on location in Montauk in late summer 2023.) Bronstein described the film’s theme and Linda’s drive as “I need help, I need help, I need help, but please don’t help me.” After her apartment floods and a gaping hole opens in the ceiling, she is forced into a hotel with her daughter, who is connected to a machine with a tube in her stomach, a walkie-talkie monitor beeping in Linda’s hands all the time when she careens between therapy appointments and rushes to buy more wine from the check-in counter downstairs. More breakdowns and past traumas resurfacing.
“I had a personal experience with my daughter, which I will not talk about in detail because it is her story to tell if she ever wants to tell it. I had never seen a film before where a mother goes through a crisis with the child, but our energy is not in the child’s struggle, it’s in the mother’s struggle, says Bronstein, whose film keeps Linda’s daughter (Delaney Quinn) out of the picture until the final scene. outburst Danielle Macdonald as one of Linda’s patients, one whose maternal angst begins to eerily resemble that of Andrea Yates, the Texan sentenced to life in prison for drowning her five children.A charmingly funny A$AP Rocky also plays Linda’s neighbor at the hotel, who takes a perverse fascination with this epically dizzy working mom.
“It’s about having to function in the world while dealing with deep trauma that you don’t have time to bring out and actually give it,” Bronstein said.
“It was fascinating because she’s in this crisis, and I thought, ‘Who was she before?’ Who is that person? I was obsessed with it, who (she is) before this trauma. She’s already at the end of the road when we meet her, and it’s getting worse and worse, says Byrne.
O’Brien said, “I’ve spent over 30 years talking to actors and performers. To see someone of Rose’s caliber do what she does, you see her do it once. I saw her do it 15 times… I don’t know how you did that and didn’t check into a hospital afterwards. I haven’t seen any actor, male or female, hold that level for a whole movie. I feel like I have to go to a hospital now because it’s my first time see it. I’m a mess.”
Expect Byrne to be in the awards conversation for a thrilling film that’s a challenging seat, the reason movies are built around an all-timer performance in the first place, and one that’s now the hottest ticket at Sundance. It’s only day two, but “If I Had Legs” just brought the defibrillators to Park City.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by A24 later this year.
